student, traveler, technologist

Tag Archives: way of kings

Fin­ished read­ing Bran­don Sanderson’s The Storm­light Archive: The Way of Kings, and I was not dis­ap­pointed. Some very inter­est­ing char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, and the detail he pro­vides of the cul­ture and world really brings it to life. I’m a fan of any author that can write in such a way the book dis­ap­pears and I can instead watch a movie in my head. Dali­nar is an excel­lent char­ac­ter, and his adhere­ance to the Alethi Codes of War is com­mend­able. The 4th code is one our own lead­ers could learn to fol­low: “Lead­er­ship. The offi­cer will require no action of his sol­diers that he would not be will­ing to per­form himself.”

Life before Death. Strength before Weak­ness. Jour­ney before Destination.

After fin­ish­ing up the novel, I ran across some inter­est­ing posts on Hack­erNews and Red­dit. There was a gen­eral tone in sev­eral of the com­ments that res­onated quite well with me as it can be applied to many facets of our lives. In short:

Iden­ti­fy­ing flaws in a plan or approach is easy.

Devel­op­ing func­tion­ing solu­tions to solve the same prob­lem while avoid­ing intro­duc­ing sim­i­lar or worse flaws is difficult.

For every awful deci­sion you see, there was a rea­son that some­one, likely begrudg­ingly, decided that it would have to do.

As with so many things in life, con­text is often key. If some­thing seems to have no good rea­son for being the way it is, refrain from ridicule and have a dis­cus­sion. You just may be sur­prised by what you learn.